Another problem with multiple album artists
#1
I have some problems with two collaboration albums.

First album:
"Loveland" by Jai Uttal & Ben Leinbach

Second album:
"Music for yoga and other Joys" by Jai Uttal and Ben Leinbach

The collaboration are between the same artists, but in the first release they use "&" and in the second one "and".
I would like my library to show two artists (Jai Uttal, Ben Leinbach) with two albums each.
With Musicbrainz Picard I use the albumartists script (as suggested here) and my advancedsettings.xml is edited to use " & " as artist separator.

When I try to tag the albums with Musicbrainz Picard I encounter several problems:
- In the Musicbrainz database the first album is correctly tagged under release information with two artists and " & " as joining phrase. The second one as incorrect tagging, with only one artist (Jai Uttal and Ben Leinbach) without any joining phrase.
- For the first album I cannot use the albumartists tag, even after running the script. I can see the tag for the second one.
- I tried to manually tag the albums in many ways. I also tried to use identical tags (with the exception of the albumartists tag that I can't get to show) between the two albums, like this

    - Artist: Jai Uttal & Ben Leinbach
    - Album Artist: Jai Uttal & Ben Leinbach
    - Album Artist Sort Order: Uttal, Jai & Leinbach, Ben
    - Artists Sort Order: Uttal, Jai & Leinbach, Ben
    - Artists: Jai Uttal; Ben Leinbach
    - albumartists (only for the second album): Jai Uttal; Ben Leinbach

The result is always the same, with some exceptions.
The first album (Loveland) shows up correctly in my library.
The second one (Music for yoga and other joys) only appears in the library under one artist called Jai Uttal and Ben Leinbach.

Can you please help me?
Thank you.
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#2
Unfortuantely yes the Musicbrainz entries have been made inconsistently.

While "Loveland" b5528c04-28f5-4fbd-9126-ac2da02c5f9c
has individual artists Jai Uttal eb6f3fca-c40c-4740-b288-a7f5744c6cec and
Ben Leinbach e48b2595-1cde-482e-a6c1-7a283d3684ac

"Music for yoga and other Joys" 20bba6f3-d39a-3948-b235-fb8cba066c75
has "Jai Uttal and Ben Leinbach" as a single artist 95e748a4-e1eb-4e08-8948-60c2a659a783

I also see you have a edit pending at Musicbrainz to correct the latter to be a collaboration of individual arrtists, that is exactly the right thing to do. When that is accepted by Musicbrainz (I see no reason it should not be), then you will need to retag that album. You could try to do that manually now, but in my experience users often make a mess of that, so maybe wait for the Musicbrainz database to be updated and use Picard.

Meanwhile you have tried to change the artist and album artist tags and separator to try and get individual artists, but the Musicbrainz id tags are dominating so this has not made any difference to the outcome. When music files have mbid tags (and if Kodi finds some it assumes that all the necessary mbid tags are present and consistent) then Kodi uses them. If you removed all (artist and album related) mbid tags from the music files of "Music for yoga and other Joys, and tagged with

  - Artist: Jai Uttal & Ben Leinbach
  - Artists: Jai Uttal / Ben Leinbach
  - Album Artist: Jai Uttal & Ben Leinbach
  - Albumartists : Jai Uttal / Ben Leinbach
  - Album Artist Sort Order: Uttal, Jai / Leinbach, Ben
  - Artists Sort Order: Uttal, Jai / Leinbach, Ben

then you would get separate artists. I don't know if you are using a tag format that support multi-frame values e.g. FLAC or ID3 v2.4, Picard shows these as separated by ";" when actually they are separate values and not using a separator. Since Artists and Albumartists tags do not get displayed by Kodi, if you are using single frame format e.g. ID3 v2.3 then using the standard " / " separator ensures they are read regardless of settings in advancedsettings.xml

If you are impatient and want to do the artists mbid tags in advance of your edits being applied in the Musicbrainz  then ensure that you also have tags
- Musicbrainz Artist Id eb6f3fca-c40c-4740-b288-a7f5744c6cec;e48b2595-1cde-482e-a6c1-7a283d3684ac
- Musicbrainz Release Artist Id eb6f3fca-c40c-4740-b288-a7f5744c6cec;e48b2595-1cde-482e-a6c1-7a283d3684ac

Note the mbids for both artists in the same order as their names.
But get it wrong in even a small way and things will get very confused. If that does happen, move all music files that involve those artists individually or in a collaboration; clean the library (that will remove the artists as long as no other music refers to them) ; finally move them back to your music source and do a library update.

Good luck Smile
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#3
Hi Dave and thank you so much for your detailed explanations!
It all makes much more sense, now.

Yes, I have requested the artist splitting on Musicbrainz database but if I understand correctly it has to be voted before being accepted. We're not talking about very popular artists here, so I gues this will take some serious time.
In any case I wasn't aware of the fact that  the mb tags were dominating over my local tags, and that was a part of the problem.

Anyway I already tried to edit the the tags, included the Musicbrainz Artist Id tag but I was leaving the Musicbrainz Release Artist Id out. Now that I've edited it with your suggestions, everything worked just fine! So a big thank you!

I just have one other question: I'm using the ID3 v2.3 tag format, because that's the one that is set by default on musicbrainz picard. Should I change it to 2.4? What are the differences? Choosing one or another does have effects on compatibility with other music managers?

Thank you
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#4
Well done Paco, I like to inform users but some can make a right hash of appying mbid tags manually.
(2019-04-02, 12:43)PacoM Wrote: Yes, I have requested the artist splitting on Musicbrainz database but if I understand correctly it has to be voted before being accepted. We're not talking about very popular artists here, so I gues this will take some serious time.
As a beginner your Musicbrainz edits will be open for votes for 6 days, and they as long as no one objects it will be applied. You can gain a "reputation" as you do more edits, but mostly it is just about waiting.
 
(2019-04-02, 12:43)PacoM Wrote: I just have one other question: I'm using the ID3 v2.3 tag format, because that's the one that is set by default on musicbrainz picard. Should I change it to 2.4? What are the differences? Choosing one or another does have effects on compatibility with other music managers?
ID3 v2.4 was released in 2000 and consequently AFAIK is supported by modern media players and managers. There is talk of issues with WMP, but I think there is an extension that fixes it. Older car radios could be an issue too. But I'll be honest all my music is FLAC because I prefer a lossless format, so I am talking theory not practice.

Multi-frame support (as 2.4 provides) is idiot proof when it comes to multiple value tags, with 2.3 you have to use a separator. The original ID3 standard suggested "/" but that causes issues with "AC/DC" so Kodi started using " / " (as default) to avoid it. Arist names have all kinds of punctuation "AC/DC", "Earth, Wind & Fire", "Ommph!", so it can be hard to identify a unqiue separator. Media Monkey uses ";", and that is probably a better choice although there is at least one artist at Musicbrainz with ";" in their name.

Since v17 Kodi has offered support for user defined separators when reading artist and albumartist tags. This can save users from having to retag if they used ";" as the separator say in some of their music. Use this facility wisely e.g. you have added "&" but I hope don't have any "Earth, Wind & Fire".

I has some other tricks as well e.g. support for ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags, which means you can have
ARTIST = "Artist1 (with Artist2 and Artist3)" and see that during playback
but also provide
ARTISTS = "Artist1 / Artist2 / Artist3" using standard " / " separator but never visble on GUI
and enable Kodi to identify the 3 artists as individuals.
 
That can also be used with mbid tags - Kodi needs to be able to identify individual artist names to match with the mbids.

Using 2.4 none of that separator business is needed because of the multi-frame support.
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#5
Wow, wonderful!

So, if I understand correctly, 2.4 would be better because you don't need to use separators between tags. So no need to edit the advancedsetting.xml, right?
And FLAC has its own tag system, which works like 2.4, correct?

And yeah, the " & " separator isn't a smart choice: I have some collaborations in my music library with " & " between the artist names, but I'd like them to appear as a single artist.
My music library (which isn't that big for now) needs to be correctly tagged anyway, so i think I'll switch to the 2.4 tag format.

Thank you so much for your time, it's very appreciated!
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#6
The only real reason to have extra artist separators in advancedsetting.xml is if you have tagged using a mix of separators (say for some other media player), or if being lazy. For example I have a number of older songs with ARTIST = "ArtistA with ArtistB" and I want them seen as individuals, since none of my artists have the word " with " in their name I have added it as a separator.

A better way would be to have add a two value ARTISTS tag "ArtistA" "ArtistB" (or "Artist A / ArtistB" if single frame), but that means find the few files that have kind of taging.

FLAC files can be tagged with Vorbis comments that are also multi-frame.

If you are tagging then I would say use ID3 v2.4 format tags, let Picard do the heavy lifting and add mbid tags which make scaping additional art and info more accurate and efficient, but use the script setting to add ALBUMARTISTS tags on collaboration albums. It adds ARTISTS tags by default. A little bit of user tweeking is sometimes needed to make everything perfect, for example the insconsistent entries you corrected. I tend to browse each album on the internet to ensure I get the right release etc. A bit more attention for collaborations, and all is good.
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#7
Yep, perfect!
I don't have any other question, thanks a lot for your help!
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